Why can't buying a house be so much easier?

This house-hunting thing and mortgage-shopping thing has become the bane of my existence.

Thus far I’ve spoken to four respectable lenders (as compared to potentially dodgy lenders on the internet) and none of them have given me numbers I can deal with. I can’t pay $1,500-1,600 a month for a mortgage. I just can’t. So logic says, “Okay, you’ve held on for this long; why not just keep waiting until housing prices drop further?” Yes, I’m paranoid that there’s going to be another housing boom and I’ll lose my chance to buy a place, but I recognize that it’s not a very realistic fear. Everyone on the news is saying that prices will continue to drop for another year or so; although they might just be panicmongers, there’s really no reason for me to not believe their core message, just like there’s no reason for me to think that interest rates will suddenly skyrocket. My immediate problem is that I actually found a great house on Friday night.

We (my brother-in-law Bryan, my realtor Allie, and me) went to look at two houses in Frederick. The first house seemed okay on the outside. It looked like a relatively quiet, working-class street of duplexes. Allie told me it was highly Hispanic and I was like, “I don’t care. I just want to live somewhere quiet, where I don’t have to worry about hordes of people standing out on the street at night, talking loudly and playing music and whatever.” Really, my neighbors can be black, white, Asian, three-headed, whatever, as long as they’re not dangerous and/or noisy. In terms of race, ethnicity, and religion, all people are the same in my book.

The backyard was huge and had potential. The much-anticipated hot tub was a washout, though—it looked like something from a horror movie. The yard had two water features: a long, narrow, canal-like pond which looked like it might have a small waterfall mechanism, and a full-scale pond. It was massive! At first I was charmed by it but then I realized just how much work it would entail. It would need one or two pumps and god knows how much other maintenance in order to keep it from turning into a West Nile virus factory. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get into the house. The listing agent had warned Allie that the renting tenant might not let us in, and he was right. The house was dark when we arrived, the blinds were drawn, and no one answered the door. What the hell? Why isn’t the seller doing anything about that? When my previous landlord was selling his house, I had to let prospective buyers wander through my apartment no matter what time of day it was! Allie offered to come back and take digital pictures inside the house for me, which sounded good to me. But later Bryan—who had previously grudgingly admitted that the street didn’t look too bad—began saying how this neighborhood has the highest crime rate in all of Maryland—worse even than Baltimore and PG County. I was thinking, Uh, great. Well, if I’d really had a keen interest in the house, I possibly would’ve ignored his warnings. Or, I should say, I wouldn’t have taken them at face value. Instead, I would’ve done independent research to try to figure out just how unsafe the area is. But the thing is, I didn’t have a keen interest in the house. It was cute on the outside but it was too expensive ($190k) and the yard seemed too daunting. So I just told Allie to forget about taking the digital pictures for me.

The second house has so much potential. That’s the great house I mentioned earlier. Is it my dream house? No. It’s just a run-of-the-mill brick townhouse from the 1960s on an average street in Frederick. But the street seemed quiet and nice (granted, it was raining, so that could’ve kept the hooligans inside), and the house is next to a church, which gave me a strange feeling of safety, even though I’m completely areligious. Allie did a bit of research and found that there isn’t a lot of turnover in that neighborhood—people stay there for quite a few years. That’s a good sign. Plus, although the house has a HOA fee, I wouldn’t need to get homeowner’s insurance, which would save me money. Apparently with condos you only have to get renter’s insurance. I never knew that before.

The house itself was average but it was a perfect size for me. There’s a dining room, albeit one that’s basically part of the living room, and there’s also room for a table and chairs in the kitchen. There’s a half-bath downstairs and the basement is quite large. It has an unfinished section to serve as a laundry room and the finished section could serve as my storage area and as the place where I eventually put an exercise bike (I’ve decided that my lazy ass needs to get in some semblance of mediocre shape). The master bedroom had been split into two children’s bedroom with a makeshift picket fence (yes, an actual fence!) and the owner offered to either take it down to restore the room to its original state or put up a permanent wall to create two rooms. This would give me a guest room and an office. There are loads of closets—I was impressed by that. The house has a fenced in patio that would really be perfect for me. It’s small, but still big enough for a café table and chairs, a bird feeder, and lots of potted flowers. It would give the cats fresh air yet keep them safe, because the wooden fence is high.

Negatives: the appliances and windows are all quite old and would probably need to be replaced pretty soon, and for some inexplicable reason the central air doesn’t extend to the upstairs, so that would have to be done. Not just because I like it cool when I sleep, but also because it’s more energy-efficient. I mean, any air blowing downstairs is going to drift upstairs, which would keep the downstairs from getting very cool, and thus the a/c would pump harder to keep the downstairs cool. Aside from those things, though, the house is in good shape and would look splendid with wooden floors and my jewel-toned walls.

But at $179,500, I can’t afford it. That’s the bottom line. Even with getting two mortgages to keep PMI at bay, which would save me money, I can’t afford it. And that just makes me so incredibly sad, I can hardly bear it. Bryan thinks the pricetag is crazy and the house should only cost $165k at the most. But Allie said that a counteroffer should only go down to $175k. If it did go lower, maybe I could afford it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s worth trying? The seller almost had the house sold but the deal fell apart the day before settlement. He has already moved into a new house and wants this place gone so he doesn’t have to pay two mortgages. Maybe he’d be willing to settle for less money.

What else can I do? I’m going to contact a mortgage broker friend of Bryan’s tomorrow and see if I can magically get better numbers out of him. He’s a very nice, very honest guy; I got some decent numbers from him back in 2005 when I first started thinking about buying a house, and he did a fabulous job with refinancing Kristen and Bryan’s house twice. Maybe I’ll ask how much my monthly payment would cost if the house cost $165k, just in case. It probably wouldn’t be much lower, though. That’s the frustrating thing about mortgages: a price drop of $10k really makes no difference in your monthly payment.

This is all so close, and yet so very unreachable…


song heard most recently before posting:
Symphony No. 29 in A, K. 201, 1st movement—WA Mozart